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Morning Dew and Roses: Nuance, Metaphor, and Meaning in Folksongs. By Barre Toelken. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Pp. xii + 189. References, index. $32.95 cloth.
With its lovely suggestive title Morning Dew and Roses, Barre Toelken 's book on nuance, metaphor, and meaning in folksongs is most readable. It is anything but a dry account of figurative language, for the richness and nuances Toelken examines are also reflected in his own language use, hence the metaphorical title and chapter headings. Toelken 's book on metaphors is an enlarged, modified, and mixed version of essays that have been published before. Although it is written not only for scholars but also for singers and public audiences, a subject index and page numbers for passages cited (from books or magazines) would have been beneficial to all.
In its theoretical (and stylistic) approach, Morning Dew and Roses is heavily indebted to what has become one of the standard linguistic textbooks on metaphor, namely George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (1980). Lakoff and Johnson argue convincingly that the metaphor - as a way of substituting one kind of item, quality, or action for another - is not a device of the poetic imagination or rhetorical flourish, but a matter of ordinary language and our human conceptual system. How pervasive metaphors are in everyday language, thought, and action is amply demonstrated in Metaphors We Live By. To a certain extent, Morning Dew and Roses supplements this evidence by providing numerous examples to show the power of figurative language in lyric and narrative folksongs, ranging from traditional ballads to riddle songs, and from popular country-western music in the United States to modern pop yodeling in Germany and Austria.
Toelken 's concern is not with "the fossils" that...